I have a bit of a confession to make - but it might interest the budding writers among you. I see visions, pictures first and then write the narrative. Yes, that's the explanation of why my novels are so visual, which is something many readers have commented on over the years. You won't find this in the books telling you how to write your first novel, but it is very important to me. Let me give you one or two examples that might help to explain it a little further. 

If I go away to write, say to a desert island (and I do), I don't take other novels to inspire me, though I do take them because I enjoy reading them. I take pictures. By pictures I don't mean DVDs, though DVDs would work in just the same way for me. A young lady dear to me asked me to explain what I meant by this. I showed her one or two pictures, one taken from somebody else's art, one painted by me. 

I asked her, "What do you see in these pictures?"

She told me what she saw, describing the pictures as she saw them. In essence she gave me an accurate enough description of what was shown. Then I explained what I saw in them. It took me a short while to do so. "Now," I laughed, "do you understand why I take pictures with me when I go away to write?"

"Yes," she nodded. "For you a picture isn't just a picture, it's a story."

She hit the nail on the head.

I shall try to illustrate this in a more practical way. I shall add a simple photo shot of Mo's magical torus from my fantasy series, The Three Powers.  It will be the first time that readers will see the ordinary, but also if you look more closely, the extraordinary nature of the torus. It isn't imaginary in the sense that I, or anybody, has painted it. I bought this very strange sculpture on a remote desert island long ago and, later on in my fiction, I placed it around Mo's neck on a leather thong.  The same applies to all of the friend's crystals.  I discovered them, studied them, held them in my hands to feel the sense of them before ever Granny Dew conferred them on the four friends.

You see, a physical object is also a story to me and as inspiring as a picture. You won't be surprised to hear that, without anything but a rudimentary training in art, I once ran my own art gallery, in the Lancashire town of Bolton, UK. I much enjoyed contact with "fellow artists". My art gallery was known as "Bolton Fine Arts". 

My love of art enables me to be inspired by great art, from any period. I regret that the only art I don't like is Surrealism, because it feels unnatural to me - like an art that doesn't come from the mixed inspiration of conscious and the subconscious but from deliberate conscious manipulation, like the manipulation of a stage magician.

There will be people who disagree with me. I do acknowledge their right to disagree. But that's another story in art, as in literature.